1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an output control data generating device that is used to control an output device.
2. Related Art
A printer having plural code pages that store data for a plurality of font patterns (font output data such as bitmap data for each character) is known from Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-H06-183071, for example. There are two methods of printing on such a printer: using a printer driver that runs on a personal computer to send the screen font data used on the personal computer to the printer, or substituting the screen fonts with printer fonts (“output font data”) that are stored on a code page in the printer. While the latter method improves the printing speed, it requires a 1:1 relationship between the character code set of the screen font and the code page storing the output font data.
However, with the adoption of a character code set, such as Unicode, that contains a plurality of character code sets covering multiple languages and addresses all characters with a single character code system, technology enabling an application that runs on a personal computer to freely use any desired characters and to print those characters using the font pattern data stored in the printer without being limited by the code pages stored in the printer is desirable.
This problem is not limited to outputting data to printers and other printing devices, and is common to outputting characters to other types of output devices including personal computer display devices.
See also Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-2004-348486, Japan Patent No. 2944338, and Japan Patent No. 3896683.